This is a finding that we made in one of the contracts - the bank guarantee is not valid. The contract is for construction, it turned out that there are several more contracts. We have notified the National Security Agency, the Military Prosecutor's Office and the National Prosecutor's Office. We have held meetings with the banks. We have corrected the checks. This was stated by former Defense Minister Atanas Zapryanov on BNT.
According to him, we are talking about 16 contracts for 16 million leva. "Some companies have corrected the bank guarantees, but there are still problematic contracts. This is illegal activity by the companies that signed the contracts. "No Ministry of Defense employees participated," Zapryanov specified.
The former minister noted that some of the contracts were fulfilled, despite the fact that the bank guarantees were not valid. He added that these were mainly projects in "Graf Ignatievo".
Zapryanov explained that during his term of office he did not pay more than 30% of the contracts.
He also commented on the decision to suspend military aid to Ukraine.
"We gave Ukraine a lot of what we could have given," he was categorical. "This is a decision of the National Assembly from 2022, according to which the Ministry of Defense is allowed to provide military-technical assistance to Ukraine with assets that are unnecessary or unusable", added Atanas Zapryanov.
Zapryanov emphasized that all packages provided to Ukraine have compensatory amounts. According to him, in 2025, our country received several hundred million leva as compensatory amounts for military assistance to Ukraine. "These funds were used to modernize the armed forces. We have used these funds from the budget of the Ministry of Defense for these projects," he added.